Remember that, strictly speaking, our status quo trend should be considered as an alternative too. Let's call it Alternative Zero. Actually, I was a bit naughty to try to avoid treating it as an alternative today in class. It would need to be evaluated along with the other alternatives, despite not being favoured by the President and her team.
Recall that the President of the University frames the problem with a focus on cars searching for parking as a nuisance (or externality).
"It is important that students, staff and faculty who choose to drive a car to campus are able find a parking place quickly and reliably when they arrive and that the campus roadways no longer be clogged with cars circling for a parking place, delaying everyone, including buses."Her policy analysis team offered three additional options (in addition to status quo, which is obviously not a favoured option):
- Alternative 1: Expand parking from 2000 places to 3000 and keep parking free
- Alternative 2: Ration demand with priced monthly permits
- Alternative 3: "Performance-based” parking pricing
I suggested that the team also distilled the decision criteria down to three main ones (assuming all are designed to be effective initially at least):
- Acceptable cost to the University
- Enduring effectiveness
- Acceptable cost to customers (especially students presumably)
We began to simulate 'projection of outcomes' by you asking me questions (pretending that I was going off to do the modelling etc). For example you found out that:
- the cost to build a new parking structure (Alt 1) is claimed to be $2 million (about $2000 per space) with annual enforcement costs of $5,000.
- that Alternative 1 is projected to result in a renewed parking shortage problem again within 10 years.
- That revenue from parking in Alt 1 is almost zero (small revenue from fines for haphazard parking or parking in restricted locations). So funds for the parking expansion will have to come from cuts elsewhere in the University budget.
We will continue with this next on 16 October. In the meantime, you may have more questions?
8 comments:
Just a small question: Are there any dollar values on the cost of administration and enforcement of the parking permissions (A2) and the installation of the ERP-like system (A3)?
Thanks very much!
Professors, I am a little a bit confused by the second alternative, fee charged on regular park-clients but free for occasional visitors. I am just wondering whether it would be feasible, because in my mind, it will be quite impossible to distinguish between a regular student driver and a visitor. Were I the student, I will "occationally" visit the school every day. Hence, how can the school charge me since I think I am just a visitor?
Of course, the school may set up a database to record each cars' appearance frequency so that the daily "ocassional" visiting students can be identified, but the budget on such database will be extremely high for the equipment installment and daily operation.
In my mind, such an alternative needs revision.
Sorry to have been a bit slow to answer.
Let's say that enforcement costs are small for alternative 1 ($5000 per year).
Enforcement costs for Alternative 2 are much more (about $30,000 per year) because it would require a full time parking enforcement person probably and maybe some simple equipment.
So Hairong is right that there would be some enforcement effort needed. But I don't think this would be prohibitive. Non permit holders would be easy to find if permit holders are required to display a badge. This would still be cheaper than setting up a system to charge casual visitors for parking and kinder than just banning visitor parking!
Which reminds me. I need to mention the cost for the "ERP parking" system (alternative 3). This would have an initial installation cost of $400,000 with ongoing costs of $7,000 per year, including enforcement.
By the way, can anyone make a rough estimate of monthly revenue under each system? This would probably need to be considered as part of the analysis.
Maybe I didn't answer Hairong clearly enough just now.
As you say, the enforcement officer would need to keep a running list of recent non-permit vehicles. It doesn't have to be perfect but the effort needs to be enough to deter most people from "visiting every day". The enforcement effort combined with the size of the penalty would aim at being just enough so that a regular cheater would find their fines would usually be more than $50 per month. So they would quickly decide it is cheaper just to get a permit. Does that make sense?
I find this exercise useful and am glad Boyd introduced the "value creep" that was happening while Paul was taking responses from the class.
Is it possible to take decisions in vacuum? Decisions where only the numbers count? Or are decisions also coloured by precedents, by a culture of decision making?
Also, through the picking of criteria, did we begin to determine the choice of the alternatives that interested us?
Bharath,
My short answer to your question is no, it is not possible to make decisions in a value vacuum. Note: this opinion is most certainly not shared by all. :)
If one accepts my answer, then the next really interesting question is: how can we make well informed decisions? Because, we still need numbers and we still want to make good impacts with our programs? And for that, we need science. So (and many people are struggling with this very question), how do we make science matter in the policy process when values bias analysis?
On the other hand, not all issues are controversial value-wise. For these issues, can we rely more on science and analysis or might they still suffer from the same problems we encounter in more value-laden or controversial issues?
Dear professors, the flowing thoughts come to me when I am reviewing the theories and policy instruments we learned before.
So far, we haven’t discussed much about public participation in public decision. But, there is an increasing tendency that involving the public in policy negotiation and decision making can hardly be ignored. Stone has pointed out that public policy would have to deal with a paradox implicating four overarching values, namely, Efficiency, Equity, Security and Liberty. I am just wondering, is democracy also a value that pursued by policy science?
We have been calculating, comparing and measuring the benefits and tradeoffs of almost all the alternatives we may conceive, and try to convince ourselves and the stakeholders that our policy proposal would maximize someone’s welfare in some terms. However, will such positive methodology be in the way of policy science’s pursuit of participatory democracy? One of the ambitions of policy science, as Lasswell advocated, is to promote democracy through rigorous application of scientific methods. My personal interpretation is that public participation should be one of the so-called “scientific methods”. And it is one of the policy instruments we rarely explore in the class.
Admittedly, there should be more challenges to the application of public participation. For example, how to balance the efficiency and public participation in decision making, while at the same time guaranteeing the stakeholders’ political rights and avoiding the inefficiency and uncertainty of public participation as well. How to design the fashion of participation and make sure that democracy is rightly managed and will not go against the value of policy science.
In the case of parking on campus, why do not we think about involving the stakeholders into our decision making? The population is relatively small, the cost of information is tolerable and every stakeholder is wise enough to participate and argue, in a word, public participation in this scenario is possible. Furthermore, in such participation, every participant is able to get the same information and be responsible for their own votes. The serious challenge is, we need a sensible manager who is capable of promoting the overarching values (democracy included) at a reasonable cost. That’s why those public managers should be professionally trained.
Xiaofeng,
Yes, public participation is a value often advocated in policy science. Some favour it because of its "usefulness" (e.g. producing outcomes that are more broadly supported, better informed, etc) and some for its "good" (e.g. democracy is a good result even if it doesn't yield better outcomes along other criteria). Paul and I have chosen not to emphasize public participation because it's a complicated topic that requires more than a "participation is good" discussion. Not all offers of participation are genuine, and not all genuine participation efforts are effective (as you note). Sometimes, badly designed participation can actually cause more harm than good!
As for the rest of your questions, they are good ones and the potential subject of an entire course. The only issue I have is that you shouldn't assume that public participation is always more uncertain or inefficient than regular policy process activities. In some cases, a good participatory process can actually be quicker, lead to better implementation (remember to keep the whole policy process in mind), and produce more innovative solutions.
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